Introduction

GUY LANCASTER Introduction “ The cedar stump to which Ed Coy was burned has been manufactured into cuff buttons.” — Arkansas Gazette, March 11, 1892 “ Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” — William Shakespeare, The Tempest hile researching my previous book on racial cleans- ing in Arkansas, I spent many hours in front of various microfilm readers, scanning years and years of Wnewspaper headlines hoping to catch sight of some reported event that would explain the dramatic loss of black population in the county in question between two census surveys. As weeks of state and local history flitted by my blurry eyes, I hit a number of stretches in the newspaper record wherein it seemed some new racial atrocity, or rumored race riot, was occurring on a near- daily basis. Headlines shouted the impromptu execution of yet another unfortunate individual, and the pursuit of another anticipated sacrifice by a frenzied posse, and more, and yet more. It proved difficult to pass over these many events and stay focused upon the subject at hand — specifically the expulsion of African Americans, a phenomenon that only occasionally overlapped with that of lynching and other mob activities — amid this wider ecosystem of violence. And I am not the only person who has been taken aback by sheer ubiquity of atrocity reported; as the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas once recalled, “Some years ago, my friend Bob Lancaster and I started to work on a book that would be a collection of articles from the 172 years of the old Arkansas Gazette that would catch the flavor of the Gray Lady and the 4 | inTrodUcTion state’s colorful history. The project ended, for my part, in grief over what the book would have to include: the great newspaper’s rich accounts of lynchings, vigilantes and posses that people thought kept them safe from the uncivilized minority. The stories sometimes came almost daily and were written with verve and attention to sickening detail.”1 For example, the matter- of- fact note above regarding the aftermath of the lynching of Ed Coy in Texarkana — that cuff buttons were being manufactured from the cedar stump on which he was burned — made the front page of the Arkansas Gazette some twenty days after the event occurred, included in the State News column among such trivialities as “Camden’s electric plant will be in operation within the next sixty days” and “Editor W. D. Rice, of the Prairie Gem, published at DeValls Bluff, says he will soon change the name of his paper.”2 Indeed, perhaps more disturbing than the big, bold headlines lustily proclaiming death and dismemberment are those occasions on which a lynching is mentioned in passing among other bits of local news. The 1882 lynching of Jim Sanders in Pulaski County, for one, was first reported on page four of the Gazette, deep in the column Local Paragraphs.3 Lynching could be both the dramatic atrocity gleefully explicated under lurid headlines and the everyday occurrence that needed no further elaboration. Much of the public interest when it comes to lynching centers upon the number of victims. While scholars are also concerned with gender and patriarchy, law and order, memory and forgetting, and much more, quantifiable numbers do help us understand the dynamics that underlie lynching both through time and across geographic regions. If more lynchings occurred in one place than another, or more in one year than another, questions arise that help people to understand the shifting nature of mob violence. In his 1999 doctoral dissertation, “Racial Violence in Arkansas: Lynchings and Mob Rule, 1860–1930,” Richard Buckelew documented 318 victims of lynching in Arkansas, 231 of whom were black.4 In the years that have passed since his dissertation, more lynchings have been discov- ered in Arkansas, in part due to the growing availability of resources, especially online databases and scanned newspapers. For example, the Library of Congress maintains the website Chronicling America (http://chronicling america.loc.gov/), which offers nearly two thousand completely searchable newspapers from across the United States dating from between 1836 and 1922. This tool has greatly facilitated inquiry into lynching, especially given that many lynching reports circulated nationally, and that the full runs of inTrodUcTion | 5 numerous local Arkansas newspapers have not survived to the present day. In February 2014, the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama, released a new report on lynching in the American South that documented lynchings of 3,959 African Americans in the South between 1877 and 1950. Of these, 503 victims were killed in Arkansas. This number, however, is skewed by the inclusion of more than 200 who are alleged to have died during the Elaine Massacre of 1919. Not only does the death count from this event remain debated, but, depending upon the definition employed, many scholars would hesitate to call the Elaine Massacre a lynching per se, given that anecdotal evidence holds that US troops from Camp Pike also participated in the slaying of African Americans; the presence of federal authorities would make this less a vigilante action than something akin to a violent, government- sanctioned massacre, not unlike the Ludlow Massacre that occurred in Colorado five years before and also involved the suppres- sion of organized labor.5 The 2015 publication of Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence by Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay coin- cided with the release of the online Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology’s Lynching Database (http://lynching.csde.washington.edu/), which began with data collected over a period of thirty years by Tolnay and E. M. Beck and has since been expanded. The definition of lynching employed by these researchers is that developed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1940, which many scholars use and which requires the following: there is evidence that a person was killed; the killing was illegal; at least three people were involved in killing the victim; and the killing was justified with reference to tradition, justice, or honor. This inventory currently records 317 lynching victims in Arkansas between the years 1877 and 1950 — but, as noted, it is being maintained and supplemented as additional information arrives. Of course, as partially demonstrated by the various figures given for the “body count,” what constitutes a lynching remains quite open to debate, and the definition of lynching has shifted over time, as Christopher Waldrep ably documented in his 2002 book, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America. The word report- edly had its origin in the impromptu trials and punishment of individu- als suspected of treason during the Revolutionary War but soon came to apply, by the early nineteenth century, to the whipping of “miscreants” on the ever- advancing American frontier, typically by people representing the broader community, outside the legal process. The 1835 execution of 6 | inTrodUcTion five gamblers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, solidified a view of lynching as violence endorsed by society, an expression of popular sovereignty. This connection between community support and extralegal violence often led the Ku Klux Klan, during Reconstruction, to disguise their explicitly political killings “to resemble lynchings, hoping to win community support by making it look like they already had it.”6 In fact, Republican leaders worked hard not to describe Klan violence as lynching lest they grant it the authority of the community; as Waldrep goes on to explain, Understanding why racial violence in the Reconstruction era was not called lynching helps explain the difference between Reconstruction and the lynching era. Reconstruction was a revolutionary time, a time when power as expressed in language was genuinely up for grabs. Once the white population seized power and rallied itself into a racial bloc, then, and only then, could they kill confident that they had the support of what they defined as the community. And they understood a community- sanctioned killing to be a lynching.7 After Reconstruction, lynching became much more racialized and much more heavily associated with the South. During the early twentieth century, as concern about lynching became an increasingly national phenomenon, journalists and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Tuskegee Institute all employed varying definitions of lynching in their attempts to study, and advocate against, mob violence; the NAACP eventually moved away from an explicit connection to community support and toward the more abstract definition cited above, in part to acknowledge the increase of secretive “committees” in carrying out racial murders.8 For Waldrep, “There is no single behavior that can be called ‘lynching.’ Any attempt to impose a definition on such a diverse, subtle, and complex reality will inevitably miss the point.”9 In his introduction to his 2014 Genocide: A Reader, Jens Meierhenrich called for the equivalent of the sort of “bench research” that is the foun- dation of the natural sciences, “research undertaken with the sole objective of increasing understanding of fundamental aspects of genocidal dynamics” without any broader policy considerations — a dire need in a field established “on the borderline between moral indignation and academic inquiry,” leading to conditions in which many “advocate for solutions to the problem on the back of partial or incomplete understanding of the inTrodUcTion | 7 phenomenon.”10 Regarding racial violence in the United States, we, too, often proceed with a partial understanding of the phenomenon and a read- iness to indulge in theoretical speculation on the basis of a handful of cases; the secondary literature on lynching, much of it quite excellent, is rife with attempts to tackle the “meaning” of lynching, as if we can discuss the essence of an act the definition of which is regularly (and rightly) debated, an act that lies on a continuum with other forms of violence, both vigilante and state- driven.

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